ATLANTA Gwinnett County, Georgia, is one of the most diverse counties in the country, but you wouldnt know it from the houses on this particular block. Aside from a couple of political signs and the occasional overzealous Halloween decorator, this street in the city of Duluth is a stretch of similar two-story cream-and-brick homes, all facing similarly well-manicured lawns.

On a Thursday in October, six black women wearing bright orange T-shirts and jeans pull into this squeaky-clean north Atlanta suburb just before sundown, after what should have been a half-hour drive from the city took more than twice as long in traffic. They are domestic workers by day nannies, housekeepers and home care workers but they spend their evenings knocking on doors for Stacey Abrams, who would be the first black female governor in the history of the nation.

The plan is to skip over the houses inhabited by white people and target the voters of color. The women have a canvassing app, MiniVAN, that helps them to know which are which. Just over half of this immigrant-heavy county is non-white, but they are rare and sporadic voters so turning out the vote here could be crucial to Abrams election in what is now a razor-thin race against Republican Brian Kemp.

The work can be dangerous, so the women always keep each other in eye-shot while canvassing. Occasionally their app fails them, and they encounter a house with a Confederate flag or some other white supremacist symbol. Sometimes theres a run-in with their fellow Georgians an older white couple, for instance, backing their white Ford pickup out of their driveway and pulling up next to the women Ive accompanied today. A Kemp sign pokes out of the couples yard in the distance, and a large German shepherd pants in the backseat. The wife rolls down her window and asks the women what theyre doing there, while the husband snaps pictures of one of them and the license plate of their car.

Shechel Williams, a gregarious 45-year-old home health aide, warmly explains that they are domestic workers campaigning for Abrams. She hands the wife a flyer through the window, and the suspicious couple speeds off without saying much.

The canvasser who just had her picture taken, Nilaja Fabien, is a 46-year-old Trinidad native who has spent nearly three decades working as a nanny for white children in Atlanta. She wears a blue denim cap over her closely cropped hair and speaks softly and deliberately, as if shes leaning over to tell a secret in the library. She is momentarily shaken by the encounter with the white couple.